The Supreme Court refused Tuesday to hear former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’s appeal seeking to move to federal court his Georgia criminal charges related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) charged Meadows, President-elect Trump and more than a dozen others over accusations they unlawfully attempted to overturn President Biden’s 2020 victory in Georgia.
Refusing to hear Meadows’s bid to move courts marks a win for Willis, who has attempted to keep the defendants together for a singular trial in state court.
Trump’s election as president Tuesday has complicated that goal, however. His attorneys are expected to argue the Constitution prohibits Trump’s charges from moving forward while he is in the White House.
It remains unclear how any pause would impact the Trump allies charged alongside him. The trial proceedings already are on indefinite pause amid an appeal by some defendants seeking to remove Willis over her once-romantic relationship with a top prosecutor on the case who has since stepped aside.
In his appeal to the Supreme Court, Meadows cited a provision that allows federal officials to move their criminal prosecution to federal court if it relates to an act taken “under color of such office.” Meadows signaled he was making the gambit to assert immunity from his charges.
Lower courts rejected Meadows’s contention he was acting in his capacity as White House chief of staff, and the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals further ruled that the protections don’t extend to former officials, as opposed to current ones.
Paul Clement, a veteran conservative Supreme Court advocate who represented Meadows, said that holding contradicts the proposition behind the court’s landmark decision in July carving out criminal immunity for former presidents.
“Just as immunity protection for former officers is critical to ensuring that current and future officers are not deterred from enthusiastic service, so too is the promise of a federal forum in which to litigate that defense,” Clement wrote in his petition.
Fulton County prosecutors urged the justices to turn away Meadows’s appeal, arguing the lower court arrived at the right conclusion.
“The opinion below applied long-established principles of statutory interpretation to arrive at its holding, and review is neither necessary nor urgent,” prosecutors wrote in court filings.
The 11th Circuit’s decision has doomed similar efforts mounted by four other defendants in the case — Trump Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, and three pro-Trump individuals who signed documents purporting to be Georgia’s electors despite Biden’s victory — to move their charges to federal court.
Their efforts have proceeded on a slower timetable, and they still retain the option of going to the Supreme Court, too.
Meadows has also mounted an effort to move to his charges in Arizona over the 2020 election to federal court, but he has so far been unsuccessful there, too.
The Fulton County district attorney’s office declined to comment.
George Terwilliger, another attorney representing Meadows, called the prosecution politically motivated and expressed confidence Meadows’ immunity claims will eventually lead to his exoneration.
“The Supreme Court’s not hearing this case now only means that we will have to continue to assert his rights and his substantive innocence in state courts for the time being,” Terwilliger said in a statement.
“In the meantime, allowing the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling to stand puts all former federal officers, including those soon leaving office, at risk of being left to the wiles of every politically hostile district attorney or state AG in the country without what for 200 years has been access to a federal court for a fair hearing,” he added.
Updated at 11:12 a.m. EST
